Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

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  Copyright Page

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  For Dr. Jack

  PROLOGUE

  Al Qutayfah, Syria

  The final bolt was always a contest of will. Suleiman Malouf paused to wipe sweat from his brow, then set his feet wide, locked his arms straight, and leaned every ounce of his weight into the iron pry bar. The water pump from the old engine was stubborn—but he was more so. He pushed down on the bar with locked arms, his feet nearly coming off the ground, and finally the last hex bolt snapped. The corroded pump housing fell to the dirt with a hollow thump.

  Malouf stood back, expelled a long breath, and mopped his face with a filthy shirtsleeve. The engine block, taken from an abandoned military truck of Russian manufacture, was now separated from all its accessories. A clean two-hundred-pound block of metal would bring five dollars at the scrapyard. Maybe more if the tight-fisted Marwan was in a generous mood.

  He kicked the water pump across the workshop floor, perhaps with a bit of victory, and it came to rest in a pile of alternator housings, engine starters, and fuel pumps. He stood back and began cleaning his hands with a rag. Through the doorless entryway Malouf looked out across his domain, half an acre of dirt populated by automobile engines, corrugated roofing, and rusted oil drums. Like everything else, his collection had lost value since the war, the laws of supply and demand taking hold as ever. He was eyeing the shack he called home, and thinking about dinner, when he spotted his two nephews coming up the path. They were pushing the wheelbarrow and clearly struggling with its weight.

  Malouf smiled.

  When it came to picking up the pieces of Syria’s civil war, children had proven to be the best scavengers. Their senses of sight and smell were sharp, and their small supple bodies ideally suited to delicate steps over unstable rubble and worming into crevices. In the harshest of truths, they were also the least likely to set off unexploded ordnance. Best of all—as the young had proven in wars through the ages—they were rarely distracted by matters of risk or mortality.

  “And what do you have for me today?” he asked as they approached.

  Neither boy answered, yet he could see they were excited. Ten-year-old Naseem was the leader, sixty pounds of bone and sinew that might, if he lived long enough and found the barest of nourishment, someday develop into a hard man. Massoud was two years younger and softer, a follower if there ever was one. Their father, Malouf’s eldest brother, had been a lifelong day laborer before the uprising. Before he had traded his shovel for defiant slogans and a Kalashnikov as old as the Dead Sea. Glory has many contrivances, and the boys’ father had found his at the wrong end of an Alawite artillery barrage.

  An exhausted Naseem set the wheelbarrow down in the shade of the big acacia tree. Malouf’s eyes narrowed as he studied what was inside.

  “What do you think it is?” Naseem asked.

  Malouf stuffed the rag in his back pocket. “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  “From the old shed outside town,” young Massoud replied.

  Malouf frowned. “You went inside?”

  “Yes,” said Naseem proudly. “I used a long plank to cross over the collapsed back wall.”

  They all knew the place. It had been a stout building, older than most, which here was saying something. Thick-walled and thin-roofed, rumor had it that a tank commandeered by the rebels had been hidden inside at the height of the war. When the government got wind of it, they launched a spirited air attack. Two of Assad’s MiGs had scored direct hits, sending the roof to the heavens and toppling the old stone walls from the inside out. There had indeed been vehicles inside, but no tank among them.

  Ever since that day the building had been off-limits, the old mullah from the nearby mosque insisting that unspent ammunition lurked in the rubble. Inevitably, however, the recovery ran its course. In the mosaic of devastation, the center of town was the first to be reclaimed. Unrecognizable since the hostilities, the once-vibrant sandstone apartment buildings were forever lost, two- and three-story affairs reduced to piles of rubble no taller than the malnourished urchins who rifled through them. Malouf’s nephews had already scoured those streets, as had a small army of other young businessmen. Tin pots and copper wire were becoming scarce, and the metal carcasses of crushed washing machines and microwaves had long disappeared.

  As things became increasingly picked over in town, places like the old shed became more attractive. Naseem, apparently, had decided it was time to test the rumors.

  “Was it stable?” Malouf asked.

  “Nothing has fallen recently—you can tell by the dust, the way it lays in patterns.”

  He contemplated telling the boy he should be careful, but doubted it would do any good. Malouf moved in for a closer inspection. He tried to lift the thing, but found it incredibly heavy. It was a steel cylinder, roughly the size of a one-gallon paint can, yet it weighed at least five times as much. The outer shell was dusty and scarred, yet clearly high-grade steel—probably high in nickel content, Malouf guessed, and perhaps some chromium. There seemed to be no lid, nor any handhold, which implied it was not designed to be regularly handled. The only irregularity to suggest its purpose was a small port on one side that gave access to … something.

  “I have never seen anything like it,” he admitted. “It is too dense to be a bomb—and too well-machined. The outer case is steel, certainly. There is more metal within, judging by the weight.” He drew a wrench from his pocket and rapped on the side. They all heard a dull clang.

  “It has to be worth a lot, whatever it is,” Malouf reckoned.

  The two boys beamed at their uncle.

  “You have done well,” he said. “The metal alone is worth four dollars—eight if there is lead inside. Are there more?”

  “Yes,” Naseem said, “twenty that I could see, but I think there might be more. We covered everything so no one else would find them, and then I half-buried a spent rocket casing nearby—it looks very dangerous.”

  Malouf smiled. “My brother’s son has the instincts of a thief.”

  Naseem smiled back, knowing his uncle was pleased.

  “You boys will make good traders someday. Now go, I have work to do. I will deal with this thing later and let you know what I find.”

  “And the rest?” Massoud asked.

  Malouf thought about it at length before saying, “Leave them where they are for now.”

  * * *

  It was later that evening, the high summer sun having mercifully retreated, when Malouf got around to the canister. With some trouble, he hoisted it to his heavy bench and went to work. He concentrated on the side aperture, attacking it with a broken screwdriver, a hacksaw, and finally a hammer and chisel. Having no luck whatsoever, he gra
duated to heavier implements. It was the combination of a sledgehammer and a metal punch that ultimately breached the opening.

  Closing one eye, Malouf peered inside, and that was when he got his first surprise. In the poorly lit workroom he noticed a blue glow emanating from a cavity inside. Intrigued, he jammed a flat-bladed screwdriver into the opening and scraped out what looked like two glowing grains of rice. They were not warm to the touch, yet somehow shone, like the toy light sticks he handed out routinely to the children during Ramadan. He scraped out a few more grains and turned them in his hand. Perplexed, Malouf took them to the house.

  His wife, who was preparing supper in the kitchen, instantly stopped what she was doing when he showed her his find. Always a mystical sort, she was rendered speechless by the lustrous grains that seemed to hold their own light—this in itself a miracle—and she demanded that he hand them over. Old Malouf, more interested in the value of the metal canisters, surrendered his find with a shrug.

  His wife rubbed the blue grains on her arm, and then on her aching bunion. Sensing perhaps some relief, she asked him for more to give to her friends. Malouf agreed, but only on the condition that she finish making his dinner. One flatbread and goat cheese sandwich later, his fifth this week, the bargain was consummated.

  Over the next two days the magic crystals found their way to three other homes. One woman used them as a topical cure for her rheumatoid arthritis. Another compelled her husband to fashion a ring, setting the luminescent blue nugget into an old pewter band. A third ground the crystals into a powder which she then ingested to promote relief from a series of chronic digestive disorders.

  It was this last woman who displayed the first signs of trouble. Within twenty-four hours of drinking her concoction she fell violently ill, subject to violent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Old Malouf was next to feel the effects. By the third evening after opening the canister, he had severe blisters on his hands, blood in his stool, and the next morning found clumps of hair on his pillow.

  By Friday that week no fewer than eighteen men, women, and children had presented themselves to the clinic in Aadra. The attending physician—indeed the only physician—was a steady and well-meaning man named Dr. Kibrit.

  He was roundly flummoxed.

  Overwhelmed on the best of days, particularly during the heat of summer, he recognized that he was witnessing some kind of contagion. Yet Dr. Kibrit had never seen such a disparate array of symptoms. Some patients were vomiting blood and had severe diarrhea, suggesting a gastrointestinal malady. Others complained of dizziness, and ocular bleeding seemed prevalent. In a handful of patients he noted clear indications of kidney and lung involvement, yet this was not universal.

  Over the weekend ten more patients arrived.

  By Sunday night six were dead.

  A frantic Dr. Kibrit made calls to the main hospital in Duma. Two physicians there asked the same questions he already had, but in the end were no help in identifying the epidemic that seemed to be sweeping Al Qutayfah. Dr. Kibrit, whose residency had been in infectious diseases, ran tests for cholera, malaria, and shigellosis. He wanted desperately to have autopsies performed on the deceased patients, but since there was no formal medical examiner within fifty kilometers, he played the hand he was dealt. For eighteen hours a day he went from one bedside clipboard to the next, ordered basic tests, and interviewed patients about their diets and sanitation and common contacts. By candlelight at night—the power grid was still unreliable—the doctor pored over books on infectious diseases. He tried to find relationships and build a map of what was happening, all while his selfless nursing staff did their best to comfort the ill—and console the families of those who fell from that side of the ledger.

  Within a week of the first deaths, another dozen patients arrived with like symptoms. Dr. Kibrit knew from his interviews that there were others who’d been affected, men, women, and children who refused to come to the clinic. This he understood all too well. The Aadra clinic was run by the government, such as it was, and therefore subject to widespread suspicion. Indeed, in this corner of the world—a region that seemed to have cornered the market on mindless violence and ethnic cleansing—public suspicion ran rampant that outbreaks of illness were only some new method of terror, a weapon introduced by one tribe in order to thin the ranks of another. Dr. Kibrit considered that he might be seeing the results of a chemical or biological weapon, something the clinics had been told to watch for, yet none of the symptom profiles seemed to match.

  The clinic’s rudimentary lab produced no shortage of results: aplastic anemia, low platelet and red blood cell counts, all correlating to precipitous drops in blood pressure. Unfortunately, when summed with his clinical findings, the lab data only added to Dr. Kibrit’s disheartening volume of ambiguity. He elected to not share this diagnostic vacuum with his hard-working staff, nurses and technicians whose efforts had been nothing short of heroic. Things continued to degrade, each day bringing more patients, more deaths, and increasingly conflicted test results.

  It was the end of the second week when a young man arrived from Beirut on a mission to repair the clinic’s only viable X-ray machine. A beleaguered Dr. Kibrit let loose his frustrations, and over endless cups of sweet tea he vented while his guest listened politely.

  The younger man was a trained health physicist. He had an earned PhD, with a thesis in medical physics, and had been hired to calibrate and repair machines that either contained radionuclides or emitted radiation. There were few such devices in this part of the world, and none of the more advanced models: no radiation therapy with intensity modulation or image guiding techniques. But there was enough to keep one educated man busy—particularly when he was responsible for Syria and Lebanon in their entirety, and the bulk of Jordan.

  After two hours, a disconsolate Dr. Kibrit went back to his work, leaving the young physicist both highly caffeinated and pensive. Regarding Dr. Kibrit’s story, the man thought, but did not say, that the collection of symptoms presented was not altogether inconsistent with radiation poisoning. His interest piqued, the young man performed his own investigation into the outbreak, one that was simple and highly focused. It took no more than one bedside to get positive results.

  By that time the physicist’s caffeine was ebbing. His thoughtfulness, however, was not. At the nurses’ station—with Dr. Kibrit’s blessing—he requested and was given a list of addresses for every patient involved in the epidemic. In a quiet side room he used his tablet computer to plot the addresses on a map. The subsequent collage of red dots only hardened his convictions. He quickly repaired the clinic’s X-ray machine—a vacuum tube on the fritz—and bid the staff of Aadra’s besieged clinic good-bye and good luck.

  In his rattletrap car he drove eight kilometers north to the village of Al Qutayfah. He navigated to the densest grouping of dots on his map, and at the southern edge of Route 7, where the gravel siding relented to dust, he found a collection of small farmhouses. Pulling the car off the road, he presented himself at the first residence, claiming to be a hospital representative on a mission to return personal effects to the families of the recently deceased. He spoke tactfully and with respect to a frightened old woman, who told him she was happy to at last see some kind of official interest in the neighborhood plague. Three front doors and two cups of tea later, by a combination of gossip and logic, the physicist suspected he was nearing ground zero.

  He found it at the fourth house—if five hundred square feet of corrugated tin and scrap lumber could be referred to as such. The place was completely vacant, which he suspected was for the best. The physicist nudged the door open with his toe, and saw unwashed dishes in a tub and clothing on the floor—signs of a hasty departure. In his hand was a small case, inside which were not pairs of old shoes or wedding rings, but rather a small and very accurate dosimeter, the same one he had used at the clinic bedside. He began at the kitchen and found a high radiation exposure rate, enough to cause him to wish he had brought protective equ
ipment.

  Analysis of the rest of the home was less convincing, and so he moved outside. On the path behind the house the meter again went wild, particularly in a small ditch that had been graded to drain the property. He gazed over the place, and in the distance saw row after row of salvaged machines and cars in various states of disassembly, which only deepened his suspicions. The physicist followed his dosimeter probe into a workshop, and then out the back door. There, in late morning air that carried down from the Lebanon Mountains and across the Bekaa Valley, an old wheelbarrow leaned against a wall, and in the shade of a towering acacia tree he saw what he was after.

  Or at the very least, what he expected. If there was a hesitation, it was brief.

  The man, whose name was Moses, knew precisely what he had to do.

  ONE

  Twenty months later

  Centered on the sun-soaked island of Malta, the ancient city of Mdina stands tall and brusque, a defiant island of brown whose vaulted bastions amplify the country’s most prominent hill. Though incorporating no more than one square kilometer, the palaces and narrow streets of the medieval city have stood the tests of a thousand harsh summers, dozens of military campaigns, and in a more contemporary test of endurance, the annual invasion of a million tourists each year. For all these reasons, Mdina is a place in constant need of repair.

  Most in demand are good stonemasons.

  On the falling afternoon, with a classic portrait of burnt orange clinging to the western sky, a solitary mason put his finishing touches to the foot of an arch near the Nunnery of St. Benedict. The repair, a reissue of a simple decorative façade that bore no weight, was the kind of touch-up that had played out regularly over the last millennium. And while the cement was perhaps a more uniform mix than the mud used by craftsmen of past eras, the hammer and chisel the mason used to shape the flat faces and fitted angles were virtually unchanged, notwithstanding the likes of rubberized handles and carbide tips. Stoneworkers in other towns on the island had relented to more contemporary instruments—heavy masonry saws and compressed-air power tools—yet such advances were not favored in the Old City. The patron who today commissioned repairs here, a city formerly administered by the likes of knights and noblemen, was the Maltese Ministry for Tourism, Culture, and Environmental Affairs, a body with an unyielding eye for absolute authenticity. In a curious twist of fate, the fact that this craftsman was not a native Maltese was squarely in line with tradition. Having existed for so long at the geographic crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the time-tested stonework of Malta had been raised almost exclusively by journeyman masons.